A Wedding on the Banks

by Cathie Pelletier

  “It’s one hundred percent menopause,” Goldie said to Pike, who had been summoned off the sofa for a peek. “The Bible might call it a crown of glory, but let’s face it. What you see down there is a crazy woman.”

  “Is Uncle Vinal gonna take Aunt Vera to Bangor?” Missy asked. “Is he gonna put her in the crazy bin?”

  “He should,” Goldie answered. “Lord knows she belongs in it.”

  Next, Vera lined the porch with Christmas lights, saving a string for the scrawny outdoor tree she’d told Goldie about last December. This was why she needed some of those extra lights that her sister-in-law had stockpiled. She instructed Little Vinal, who had to disrupt his sabbatical in order to do so, to pry a thin fir into the hard mud around the newly erected mailbox. Goldie watched with interest from behind the kitchen curtain as Vera ran an extension cord out to the tree and lit it up. It was still too early in the evening to catch the full lighting effects, but once Vera was assured it was working, she unplugged it and went about tacking sprays of pine branches at random about the porch.

  Goldie stared down at the piteous tree driven into the mire near the mailbox. It was for the adoration of this that Vera had climbed the big icy hill four months ago and cried bloody murder?

  “It looks like budworms lived off it all last summer,” Goldie said to Missy, and let the curtain fall back into place. “I don’t give a damn what the Bible says, that’s the work of a genuine hot flash.”

  It was only ten minutes later that Goldie reappeared at her window, unable to resist, and peered down to see that Vera was arranging the plastic figurines of her Nativity scene in their usual place on the front lawn. By nightfall, all the plastic participants stood around the baby Jesus, who lay illuminated by means of an extension cord rather than a halo. The lighted faces of the group were in dire contrast to the low temperatures that had swept over Mattagash. Goldie looked down at the tranquil faces. There was the perpetual Mother, smiling at her naked son. Naked, and the temperature was still dropping! Goldie looked down into Mary’s peaceful face, where a layer of frost had begun to form.

  “With the windchill factor what it is,” Goldie said to Missy, who was eating relief peanut butter with a spoon, “you almost want to see Mary get up and take that baby inside.”

  “She could at least put a Pamper on it,” said Missy, plopping her empty spoon in the sink.

  It was only five minutes later when the telephone rang. Goldie was shocked to hear Vera’s breathy voice on the other end of the line. The decorating had winded her, but her anger was in full sail.

  “You can buy all the goddamn Christmas lights in Watertown!” Vera screamed. “But you don’t own ’em all. Just take a peek down your hill.”

  “You should be taking pills or something,” Goldie said. “You’re under the influence of your hormones, Vera.” Goldie was about to hang up, but Vera got in her last words.

  “Your problem, Goldie, is that you was a bastard baby,” Vera yelled. “Ed Plunkett marrying your mother ain’t gonna make any difference with the Pope. You’re gonna end up on the same cloud as them unbaptized babies.”

  Goldie put the phone back in its cradle. Then she went upstairs, away from the kids, and Pike, and the noisy television set. She went up to her bedroom, closed the door, and lay back on her bed, eyes closed.

  When Claire Fennelson, Dorrie’s mother, had told Goldie one day on the playground that Ed Plunkett wasn’t her real father, she went into the bathroom and cried hot, salty tears. Then she came out with her head held high in the air. What else could she have done? And the other children had laughed—Giffords and not-Giffords alike—and said she was stuck-up. They said that knowing her real father was from downstate had gone to her head. But Goldie knew that it was best they think this. And when they weren’t looking, she found out all she could about her real father. She coaxed it word by word out of her mother, her precious mother, when she was sober enough to talk. Goldie’s last memories of this person were of the fine yellow skin and the yellowish of her eyeballs. Her swollen ankles and the huge round blood spots on her shins. Her bloated stomach and her hardened liver. Goldie remembered how desperately those organs were fighting to get out of her mother’s body. And so were the secrets, because she told Goldie the truth before cirrhosis took her off. Her father was in a nursing home in Bangor.

  So Goldie had waited, and the day came when Pike went as far as that city to visit Clement, his second cousin. Clement had found Pike a good deal on a used Ford Fairlane and Goldie demanded to ride down with him. Once there, she got Clement’s wife, Peg, to drive her over to the home. And then she went in with her heart full of forgiveness. He was too young to be in a nursing home, but he needed medical attention. The nurse whispered to Goldie short references to excessive drinking, ruined health, dying organs. She needn’t have bothered. She could have saved her breath. Goldie had seen jaundice up so close it reminded her of how autumn came to the old vegetables in her garden, turning them to a sheeny yellow and then to mush. So Goldie had pushed quietly past the nurse and gone off down the hall in search of his room. Yes, he said, he used to live in Mattagash. Yes, he knew her mother, Mildred, but then, so did a lot of men. And no, he wasn’t, he was quite sure, her father.

  “Do I look like anyone in your family?” Goldie had asked. Everyone in Mattagash knew that Goldie looked like no one in Ed Plunkett’s family, or in Mildred Gifford’s. Surely she looked like someone in his family. A mother? A sister? Other daughters? A cousin?

  “You got to understand,” Goldie whispered to him. “All these years, I been lost out there. All these years, I been floating.”

  “No!” he told her. “Now shoo! Git!” He looked at her as if she were a fly and he wanted to swat her.

  “I’ve waited my whole life for someone to belong to,” Goldie said. “I don’t look a bit like Mama or the man she married. But I got your eyes and your cheekbones. And I got your nose, don’t I? And I bet your hair was blond once. That’s why you can’t even look at me.”

  Mildred’s old boyfriend rose up out of his chair when Goldie said this and tried to hit her. He swung something dark and rattling at her. As Goldie pulled back to avoid the impact, she saw that the weapon in his hands was a rosary.

  “You’ve cursed yourself, old man,” Goldie whispered. “I’d have taken you out of here. After all these years of nothing from you, I’d have taken you home. But now you’ve cursed yourself. That rosary ain’t long enough to keep you out of hell.”

  Goldie ignored the receptionist at the front desk who asked if she’d be coming for the Father’s Day get-together, and if so could she bring a covered dish. On the trip back to Mattagash, Pike had driven into a station to get some gas. There were only the first three kids back then, Irma, Priscilla, and Little Pee, and they were asleep in the backseat. They’d tired on the long drive down and were fussy and unhappy in the heat. Goldie was relieved when they finally drifted off, their little heads all golden and curly. This was like no Gifford hair she’d ever seen. The curls, yes, but that fine yellow flaxen was not at all like the dark chestnut hair of all their Gifford ancestors. And no one in Ed Plunkett’s family had such hair. It was Goldie’s own hair she was seeing on the heads of the children. As she shooed a fly away from Irma’s sleeping face, she noticed the little shop next to the gas station. While Pike was pumping gas and checking the oil, Goldie got out and went into the shop to browse. An old woman with a stiff leg came clumping out of a back room, wiping her hands on her sweater. She was just browsing, Goldie told her, while her husband gassed up the car.

  “We got us a six-hour drive over a bumpy road,” said Goldie.

  “I make all this stuff myself,” the old woman said. “It’s how I get by. That little check the government sends me ain’t enough to feed the cats. That little government check wasn’t worth getting old for.”

  So Goldie shopped among the pot holders and tea cozies, the dish towels and
doilies and throw rugs. She walked past terry-cloth curtains and facecloths with “Maine, Vacationland” embroidered on them with bright red stitching. And in the back there were dried-apple dolls and pine cones tied with red ribbons. There were little crocheted Santa Clauses with cotton batting beards.

  “Them’s left over from Christmas,” the old woman said. Goldie picked up a dusty set of salt and pepper shakers with a pine cone and tassel poorly painted on each. The old woman squinted at them.

  “Them’s the state flower,” she said, and spit on a finger to wipe away the dust so that Goldie could better see the little tassels. “Just between you and me,” she added, “that’s a sorry flower for a state to have.”

  The little front room was full of the old woman’s treasures, some dusty and yellowing, some fairly new. Handkerchiefs and kerchiefs. Little throw pillows. Violets stitched on place mats. Crocheted slippers. Mittens. Knitted wool scarves. On one wall Goldie saw a handsaw with a varnished handle. On the blade was painted a scene of a brook surrounded by trees in autumn. There were birds far off, doing something in the sky, and a small doe, almost too brown in color to be real, was drinking at the brook’s mouth, its velvet lips pressed like petals to the water.

  “I never would’ve thought of that,” said Goldie, running a finger along the edge of the saw. “What a pretty thing to do to a handsaw.”

  “There’s pictures in everything,” said the old woman. And as Goldie looked past the white dinner plates, which had more scenes on them, which had rabbits, and a moose, and a pulp truck, she thought of the old woman’s house as a special kind of museum. She thought of it as a gingerbread house in the forest where a good witch lived.

  “Them can be used for ashtrays,” she said when Goldie lifted a plate and admired it. “Or candy dishes. Or to hold little cakes of soap.” The old woman looked at them lovingly, imagining all their uses. On one plate was painted a picture of a little house sitting alone, a gray house with a single light in the window, with a Christmas wreath on the door, and all around it were globs of white-paint snowflakes swirling and whirling in a frenzy to come down. There was an expectancy about the little house, and the lone candle, and the deep green pines billowing in around it. There was a sadness.

  “That’s my favorite, too,” said the old woman, rolling a pair of socks into a ball and tossing them into a basket where something stirred and stretched, and Goldie saw that it was a huge yellow-striped cat. And she realized that in the dark corners of the room, even among the pot holders and little rocks painted to look like Easter eggs, among things Goldie didn’t recognize—colored strips of cotton a foot long and hemmed neatly, maybe bows for a little girl’s braids—among the sachets and hanging chimes made of painted wood chips, were countless cats curled into round balls: tigers, calicoes, blacks, whites, grays, tortoiseshells. Cats dozing among the subtle shapes and colors. Goldie thought of the old woman’s house now as a gold mine, and of all the cats as sleeping booby traps. If someone should try to take anything, there would be a quick snarl, a fast claw to the hand.

  “That little check don’t even feed the cats,” the old woman said again, and she turned her face up to Goldie, and Goldie saw that it looked like the dried-apple dolls on the shelf, all brown and wrinkled, the juice drained out.

  When Goldie saw the Christmas angels, she knew she would have to buy one. To help feed the cats. To help keep the wheels turning. The factory rolling. To keep alive the stitching, tatting, crocheting, knitting, embroidering, gluing, painting, hemming, cutting, pasting. And so she bought one. There were several of them, nearly identical except for one. Its hair was blonder. Its face sadder.

  “Their bodies is cardboard,” said the old woman, whispering. “And their dresses is from an old lace dress I had years ago.” She was telling Goldie precious secrets. And she was excited about the sale.

  “Them wings is angel’s hair left from some Christmas when my kids was small,” she said quickly, just in case Goldie might change her mind and put the angel back. She counted out the change, wetting each bill with a finger spitty from her mouth, so as to be sure, counting each smooth coin tenderly.

  “Once,” she said, trying to raise herself up to Goldie’s ear. “Once,” she said, dry-throated, tearful, “they all caught on fire. All my things. I lost plenty, I tell you. Lost all the angels but them you see. And when I come to rescue them, they had raised their arms up to heaven.”

  When Goldie took her angel and went back out into the sun, the door tinkled behind her as she closed it. Back in the car she couldn’t be sure if it had really happened, if the old woman really was in that shabby house, sitting there in the sun like a mushroom. A house full of sleeping cats, and angels, and dark secret corners. A storybook house. So Goldie imagined her inside, an old troll shuffling through the tiny rooms, arranging her trove. And every Christmas Goldie had remembered the tiny old woman. Every year she had wondered if she was now dead. If someone was feeding her cats and watering the plants. Dusting off the other Christmas angels. And every year the secret of her father sank deeper within her. She told no one, not even Lizzie, who was Ed Plunkett’s daughter, that she had found her real father. It was her secret. And the angel’s. And, in part, it was the old woman’s secret.

  Alone in her bedroom, with Vera’s lights blinking happily at the bottom of the hill, Goldie thought about fathers. She had always wanted to possess one, hadn’t she, the same way she had longed for her own pet. Ed Plunkett had paid for her food and her clothes, but he offered her little else. And Goldie had wanted to give her children a father, too. Vera’s cruel words hadn’t hurt, not in the way they were intended. Goldie knew she wasn’t headed for some eerie kind of limbo, as Vera had prophesied. What did hurt was the whole notion of fathers. Of family. Of her never having had one as a child.

  “Even dogs do,” Goldie thought. Her own children were basically fatherless, but they weren’t motherless. Goldie looked at their school pictures, scattered about on her dresser. Their heads of blond hair glistened in the reflections of Vera’s Christmas lights like little yellow clouds. Halos. Even Little Pee had one. Goldie smiled. They reminded her of the Christmas angels she had seen in the old woman’s house. They were Goldie’s angels, bad as they were. And someday she would share her secret with them. One day, when they were ready, she would say, “You got that blond hair because you got Swedish blood in you. You can trace it back to New Sweden, Maine. From there, you got to go across the ocean to the old country. But that’s the secret of the yellow. That’s your hair, explained.”

  When Miltie came up an hour later to snuggle in for the night next to his mother’s warm body, he found Goldie already sleeping peacefully.

  JUNIOR CAN’T TEACH THELMA NEW TRICKS: MONIQUE TESSIER AS A BUSINESSWOMAN

  “If I had to drive over these potholes and frost heaves for the rest of my life, I’d be forced to start wearing a bra. As it is, I have to steer with one hand.”

  —Monique Tessier, to the startled clerk at Betty’s Grocery

  Junior awakened to his first Mattagash morning in almost a decade. He checked his watch through squinted eyes and discovered it was only nine thirty. Saturday. There was plenty of time to lounge in bed now that Marvin Sr. wasn’t peering out of the funeral home like some kind of watchman, waiting to see if his son would get to the office on time. Junior had even thought of launching into his own business, but he never had the chutzpah, or the moolah, to do so. Now things were looking brighter. The evening before the Ivys set out for Mattagash, Marvin had beckoned Junior inside his leathery office and there had looked his son in the eye.

  “I’ll put it to you this way,” Marvin told his son. “You see to it that our old secretary stays gone, and you’ve got your own business in Watertown, Maine.”

  “Watertown?” asked Junior, at first disappointed to be offered a goody that lay so far north it would be frozen six months out of the year. Watertown was just thirty miles away from
being another Mattagash. But then he began to ponder the future consequences. There was only one funeral home in Watertown. Surely, with Junior’s years of citified expertise, he could easily swallow up all business until he had complete funerary control of northern Maine. Even Mattagash had stepped, albeit gingerly, into the twentieth century. Except for a few diehards, if Junior could use the pun, who were still holding wakes in their living rooms, most of Mattagash and St. Leonard were now availing themselves of professional undertaking. Junior would become a mogul. He’d be rolling in his own dough within a couple of years, and then good-bye northern Maine. He’d be off for Bangor, maybe, or Lewiston. It might even be time for a big city like Boston.

  “You see that Miss Tessier keeps walking, son, and it’s as good as yours,” Marvin promised.

  “Yes, sir,” Junior promptly agreed. “You bet she’ll keep walking. If I have anything to say about it.”

  “Good for you, son,” Marvin said, and patted his shoulder. “The wedding’s on Sunday. We’ll go first thing Monday and take a good look at Cushman’s Funeral Home, Watertown, Maine.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” said Junior.

  “You know, son.” Marvin was feeling more magnanimous than he could ever recall. “I almost gave up on you a thousand times.”

  “I know, sir,” Junior squirmed.

  “But I didn’t.”

  “No, sir, you sure didn’t.”

  “Not many forty-year-old men have a business tossed into their laps.”

  “Not many at all,” said Junior.

  “We’ll get Thelma straightened out next,” promised Marvin. He was feeling more and more like old Joe Kennedy as the days went by.

  “Good idea,” agreed Junior.

  “But keep an eye on her up in Mattagash,” Marvin warned. “Gossip travels fast in Aroostook County. It ain’t good for business to have potential clients talking about your family matters.”